Monday 8 August 2011 13.43 EDT
First published on Monday 8 August 2011 13.43 EDT

For most of Sunday evening it seemed Brixton would escape the rioting and looting that had swept across London. The Splash festival had passed off without major problems and the atmosphere was overwhelmingly good-natured as several thousand revellers drank and ate in the network of streets behind Brixton tube station late into the evening.

But at around 11.30pm the mood changed dramatically.

Police were called to reports of a large fight on the Moorlands estate, where they were pelted with missiles. More young people gathered in the centre of Brixton, with unconfirmed reports that they arrived together on buses and in cars.

The clash on the estate escalated and moved towards the centre of Brixton, where others joined in and for the next four hours officers struggled to regain control. A couple of hundred young people – some with masks or scarfs, others with hoods pulled down over their faces – hurled missiles at the police. Shops along the high street were broken into and goods were taken from H&M, Vodafone, McDonald's and T-Mobile as the police stood by, apparently powerless. For more than an hour teenage boys and girls emerged, laden with clothes and shoes, from the smashed front of the H&M store. Only a fire put an end to the looting of Foot Locker.

As word spread, cars and scooters appeared, pulling up alongside broken shop windows as people passed goods out. Some shoved what they had grabbed through open car windows, others sped away balanced precariously on the back of scooters. Many simply took what they could carry and ran off on foot.

Although the police had gathered in a nearby side street they did not intervene for about an hour. At that stage many of them were not wearing riot gear.

At about 12.30am, as it began to rain heavily, officers from the Met, dressed in protective clothing and carrying shields, started to push people back up the high street. Slowly at first they secured the area around the tube station, forming a line across the main road and then advancing in short "charges".

But by this stage the rump of the crowd had left the area, turning their attention to a large branch of Currys half a mile away. Over the next few hours the shop was ransacked, with people walking out with large flatscreen TVs, computers and household appliances.

When police tried to intervene, they were pushed back by a hail of rocks. Just after 2am a man came out laughing carrying a flatscreen TV: "That's it. It's empty, we've done the lot."

Ten minutes later, as people were beginning to melt away, another cry went up. Someone had managed to get on to the first floor where the laptop computers were kept. The crowd poured back in.

A police helicopter arrived in the early hours of the morning and officers began to gain control of the situation at about 3am.